Just to reassure you, this column is not "political". It is about that strange blip earlier in the year when some people went crazy and rioted. How quickly we moved on from that moment of madness. While insurance companies have still to pay out for some of the worst damage and some people are still homeless, the narrative established by the government has been pretty much stuck to. This was criminality "pure and simple". The incredibly harsh sentences have been largely supported by the public. Amelia Gentleman documented the reality of some of them in this paper last week. Nineteen-year-old Danielle Corns has been sentenced to 10 months in prison for stealing two left-footed trainers during riots in Wolverhampton. A bloody stupid thing to do, but 10 months? It was not only during the five days of rioting that somehow normal law was suspended. In the aftermath, judges and magistrates were ordered to come down heavy and they have.

Although we think that about 15,000 people were involved and that £500m worth of damage was caused, the political class speak with one voice: the riots were not a symptom of anything, but an outbreak of amorality. There will be no Scarman-type report. Instead, we have an interim report by the Riots Communities and Victims Panel. It is called "5 days in August", which sounds like a rom-com, and is as flimsy as one. The report tells us there was no single cause. Who thought there was? It tells us that these were not "race riots": the profiling of those in courts has pretty much shown that. But it varies from area to area. Racial tension was an element in Birmingham in a way it wasn't in Manchester. The inquiry accepts some connection between deprived areas and rioting. Class riots? But it is woefully unchallenging. Remember all the fighting talk from Duncan Smith and Cameron on gangs being responsible? Well, as anyone who has talked to those involved will tell you, postcode rivalry was suspended. But for those convicted, gang membership in prison is a huge problem.

Anyway, the important point is, as Heather Rabbatts of the panel tells us: "These were not riots that were political." OK, as I said at the time, they do not fit any easy left/right discourse: the cuts versus the breakdown of the family. But the eruption of mass shoplifting in public surely must tell us something about the closing down of political space.

Young people were perversely doing what we are all told to do. Get stuff. Stuff that is the meaning of life. They queued in the wasteland of retail parks for a bigger TV set. This is zombie shopping that made people feel alive.

I am not defending the mindless looting and burning but we cannot have it both ways: if all these people are criminals, why do they not do it more often and why did it stop? Yes, the police showed up eventually, but what about next time? If this is simply the flip-side of consumerism, as we sink into recession, are we to expect more unrest?

The failure to try to explain these events is, I would say, a wilful political act. The right seeks to shut down the space of legitimate debate by demonising or ridiculing dissent. Thus the Occupy movement are simply "fornicating hippies" as Boris Johnson called them, the rioters are greedy criminals. Many of them, indeed, already had a criminal record and were unemployed. However disenfranchised they are, they are unable to escape the cultural bombardment that is consumerism. I can have whatever I want, not because work sets us free, but "because I am worth it". The sadness of those five days was also surely about how worthless someone feels, if worth can be achieved by mere branded goods or something nicked from Poundland.

This was not a protest with properly "political aims". The rampaging id of the underclass was not pretty or logical. It merely surfaced in summer for us to recoil. But why did the shock of this dissipate so quickly as if it were merely a feverish hallucination?

Now we have more important things to think about. We are too busy feeling our own pain to care about that of these opportunistic idiots. Not to take the opportunity to look at our own values in the face of riots or recession is ridiculous. We cannot have growth or endless stuff. We cannot permanently exclude the already excluded and expect no reaction.

If our only purchase into society is what we purchase, then looting is simply a shortcut in the grotesque spectacle. For five days in summer, some helped themselves and wrought havoc. The answer to this mass eruption of criminality is seen to be police, CCTV and prison.

If we were, though, to describe these riots as political, we would have to respond differently. We would have to acknowledge that this section of society is being further trodden on, and no talk about the value of marriage or the need to move around the country to get work is achieving much. We would have to be honest and say that youth unemployment and massive inequality is considered a price worth paying for deficit reduction. And then we might have to admit there will be more riots.

The lovely post-riot clean up, all Big Society with big brooms, has been sweeping away any notion of "the political". This now belongs to those in power who define its terms. But sometimes we need to take back these terms. Just take them. Refuse their limits. Yes, loot them.